Sherwin

As a little boy, I lived in Rijswijk, the Netherlands. My mother was friends with Aunt Nel. She was living at the Huis te Hoornkade with Sherwin and Alma in their house where I liked to come.

Alma was their drooling boxer who always wanted to leap against you, which I disliked. And Sherwin was her son. He was my age and had ringlets in his hair that could hold a pencil, even when he shook his head. That was always very special to me.

Sherwin was born in another country, in Africa, where Aunt Nel had been working as a doctor for children. His family there could not take care of him and therefore Aunt Nel asked his parents if he could come live with her. That was all right to them, and when Aunt Nel went back to the Netherlands, Sherwin went with her and became her son.

I found all this quite normal and I did not notice that Sherwin’s skin was almost black and mine almost white in winter and reddish brown in summer, because that was things were like. We played with each other and with Alma, in Rijswijk and around the farm of Aunt Nel in the Dordogne, France, where we picked sweet blue plums along the road that we took home in a wheelbarrow where we made delicious jam with Aunt Nel that she did in glass jars.

In the picture above you see us with the wheelbarrow, and in the background you see Aunt Nel’s farm house. We both have our boots on. Alma is not on this picture, she will probably be with Aunt Nel somehere.

When we grew a little bigger, Sherwin moved to Hardegarijp in Friesland, a province in the north of the country, because Aunt Nel went to work as a pediatrician in the hospital of Leeuwarden. I sometimes visited them and I believe I stayed there overnight once or twice, but everything was different from our life in Rijswijk, and so I lost sight of Sherwin.

Many years later, my mother told me that Aunt Nel was deceased. She didn’t know how Sherwin was, untill after a while the news came that he was no longer alive.

Now that I see this picture of our childhood again, I feel melancholic, thinking with joy of Alma and her wet gray muzzle, aunt Nel with her swinging Renault 4 and my dear little black friend Sherwin.

In my heart they live on, and we still walk there along this tiny road in the Dordogne.